Tuesday, July 15, 2014

In 2009, when I was graduating and about to embark on my
postdoc, I was concerned about the research funding lottery and worried how I
could continue on the academic track with such prospects. My co-adviser Jasper
Rine confirmed that we were in a crisis, but he said, “NIH only acts in times
of crisis.” It was a good time to do a postdoc, and by the time I would embark
on my faculty career, things would have improved.

"My fellow Americans, today marks an important milestone in our collective history," President Obama began, "with the enacting of this bill, federal funding for health-related research will be distributed in the fairest way possible -- by physical combat."

I was somewhat encouraged, hoping that NIH would finally
recognize the extent of the crisis and avert disaster. Alas, it is clear to me
today that despite all the warnings, the vast majority of academics, and
certainly the head of NIH, are going to pretend as though there is no problem, for as
long as they can. Francis Collins, the director of NIH, just stated that he
does not believe we are training too many PhDs.

Figure 1: New faculty positions versus new PhDs.

Schillebeeckx M., et al. Nature Biotech. 31:938 (2013)

In my conversations with scientists, the waving away of the
problem is consistently justified with the following two answers:

1. Everything is uncertain. No employment guarantees
in industry either.

2. There are plenty of non-academic jobs, and
training PhDs is not vocational training for professorship.

Everything is uncertain. You can lose your job in industry too.

This is not a valid comparison. Of course no employment is
guaranteed. However, if I lose my job at Novartis, I can probably find another
one at Merck. That’s not the same as losing funding for your lab – you lose
funding at MIT, you don’t just move to Stanford. You lose your funding, and you
lose your lab. It’s not a job; it’s your entire career that is at risk.

There are plenty of non-academic jobs, and training PhDs is not
vocational training for professorship.

I applaud efforts to expose graduate students to
non-academic careers. I personally tell students and postdocs all the time that
they are valuable to the society because of their science training, across a
wide spectrum of research and non-research positions. Yet, I don’t sense that
there are enough fulfilling positions for the scientists we train (will write a
separate post on this). And I certainly don’t believe that the programs to
facilitate non-academic career exploration are in any way addressing the
central problem of academia. (By the way, telling students that there are lots of non-academic jobs is also the solution to the crisis that Francis Collins advocates.)

The problem –
academia is no longer competitive for the best and most talented researchers.

This is the part that worries me the most. We have too many
PhDs competing for postdocs. We have too many postdocs competing for
fellowships and faculty positions. And we have too many professors, competing
for grants. Combined, the low pay, hyper-competition, and the guaranteed
uncertainty at every step make the academic track a bad career choice today.

So what? As many have replied to my Goodbye Academia post,
“There is nothing wrong with getting out of academia. We, taxpayers, fund your
training so you can join the industry, start biotechs, and not just sit in the
ivory tower.”

I love my role at ZappyLab. I do not regret getting a PhD or
doing my postdoc – no way I could have founded ZappyLab otherwise. But my
question to the taxpayer is, “Who do you want as professors, training the next
generation of scientists for the biotech/industry jobs?”

The NIH alone spends $30b each year of taxpayer money,
supporting 50,000 grants across laboratories at 2,500 institutes. Who do we want heading the laboratories under these
grants? Who do we want training the future researchers? If the best scientists aren’t the ones training, what does it mean for
the quality of scientists and science that will be in the industry?

We have a bubble in academia. Like all bubbles, if ignored,
it will pop. There will be a natural adjustment. We are beginning to see it
already. As I was inviting mentors to participate in our Career Forum, several
warned me that they regretted getting a PhD. They said that they would not be
able to give rosy encouragement to students and postdocs. These are folks from
the very top research universities. Folks who graduated 5-10 years ago when the
situation was far better than it is now. This is phase 1 of the
bubble-bursting. The next and most painful phase will be a decrease in the
number of talented students going into biomedical PhDs.

The system will naturally self-adjust if we take no action.
Eventually, the number of PhDs we train will decrease simply because few will
want these degrees. But what will be the cost to science, progress, and society
if this happens? The quality of academic research is already suffering with pervasive irreproducible results and outright fraud, as a consequence of the hyper-competition. We are already starting to lose the scientists with the stronger moral compass and ethical standards. If we don’t fix academia and make it an attractive career
choice again, we will all pay a devastating price.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

I am not sure. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if STAP-like
fiascos aren’t actually beneficial to a journal like Nature. Sure, the journal has been “soul-searching” and is now
suddenly aware that fraud happens and will try harder to prevent it.
But seriously, does this in any way damage the NPG brand? Are scientists going
to be less likely to submit? Does it really hurt their reputation? Or is this
much-coveted domination of the news cycle that is the kind of free advertising
that corporations can only dream of?

I am not a whacko. I know that editors typically do
everything within their power to avoid publishing bad science. In 99% of the
cases, avoiding retractions is indeed the goal. I have written extensively
about the problems of pre-publication peer review, and no journal is truly
capable of ensuring that what is published is right. That’s a function of time. I also believe that the true problem with the
glam journals is not so much the bad science they publish but the amazing
science they reject.

Still, it bothers me to the core to see Nature play a victim
here. Reading this NYT artice, it seems that Obokata is the convenient scapegoat
that everyone is happy to destroy. I don’t know anything about Obokata. I have
no inside information on this scandal. But I do know that many top scientists
have a particular distaste for Nature. Over a decade, I have heard again and
again the meme:

Nature sets up its authors to fail. They publish work they
know they shouldn’t, then call for an investigation, and then publish the
refutation.

Are Cell and Science any different? I doubt. When Science
published the Arsenic paper, it sent it to reviewers that were likely to accept. And after enjoying the extravagant claims and press, Science published
two papers refuting the original claim. Sweet. Here's what Bruce Alberts,
editor-in-chief of Science, had to say about this:

We hope that the study
and the subsequent exchange being published today will stimulate further
experiments — whether they support or overturn this conclusion. In either case,
the overall result will advance our knowledge about conditions that support
life, an important outcome for science and education

Science, Nature, and Cell have the highest retraction rates of life sciences journals. And yet
there is no indication that it hurts them the least bit. While publishing bad
science doesn’t seem to hurt them, it does hurt the scientists. It hurts
science. Crucifying Obokata is easy. But that does nothing to help the science
enterprise. What would help is if we scientists stopped sending our work to the
glam journals.